I know from my brief foray into the combined schools’ orchestra that Mr. Dalgleish is the music teacher, and not a good one. He spent most of the time tapping his plastic baton fruitlessly on the metal music stand, attempting to control the flirting epidemic that erupted in the coed band room. All I know is Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture” was technically beyond us and the least of our priorities—I’ll never hear a trumpet fanfare without my heart bolting at the memory of Isaac Rickman winking at me across the woodwind section, from behind his bassoon.
“Principal Walsh wants us to organize a photojournalism exhibition for first term next year,” the boy up front announces flatly, as if the very idea is sucking the life force right out of his body. “That means planning it this term. So we have to agree on a theme by the end of this session. Go.”
His brown eyes hold me firm. So firm that my own gaze takes flight to avoid his. I cannot seem to stay focused on him, no matter how hard I try, and now my heart is thudding erratically. I feel my face flame and the pressure descend, like this is a trick question.Does he mean me?
“Er, s-sure?” I stammer, on behalf of everyone.
“On what theme?”
I’m like Elle Woods inLegally Blondewhen she goes to that first lecture and hasn’t done the assigned reading. I don’t know anything about photojournalism. I just want to take better pictures, not that mine are bad, exactly, but …
He’s waiting.
“The patriarchy?” I panic-suggest. Bree and I have been obsessed with patriarchy-smashing since Year Eight. Why not attack it right at the source?
From behind me snorts an outburst of testosterone-laced laughter. My earlier nerves skitter aside, making way for a familiar sense of anger, because here we have to go.Again.
“Sorry—” I start, turning to glare at the perpetrators.
“Forgiven,” one of them replies, winking.
“I forgot I was at an all-boys’ school last seen on a prime-time current affairs show, scrambling to explain a scandal involving intrusive photos of female staff.”
Someone whistles, ahead of a sudden hush in the room. I blink back angry tears because this isnotjust about the teachers. When I turn to face the front again, I notice a shift in Kennedy’s eyes. He takes his clodhoppers off the desk and leans forward. “How aboutGirlsas a theme?” I suggest.
This whips the fourteen-year-olds into a frenzy. “We already took photos of girls,” a Year Nine boasts. He finds himself immediately hilarious, as does his audience.
“Yeah, we’re famous for it,” another chimes in, fist-bumping his neighbor.Why did I think this was a good idea?
“Not the kind that get sent around group chats until the school is forced to bring in a rep from the police station for a consent lecture,” I say. “The antidote to that.”
A memory blazes of that time last year when I discovered Bree, shaking and speechless in the corner of her bedroom after a boy from this school pressured her into sending photos of herself that he then uploaded to that horrible website She Loves It.
“I’ll fix it,” I’d promised her, when she looked at me desperately and cried so deeply no sound came out. But we couldn’t go to the police. Bree and the other girls could have gotten in trouble for sending the photos too, so the website has stayed this massive, ugly, unfixable secret hiding in plain sight and, more than anything else in the world, I want to blow it to pieces.
“So, unfiltered portraits of our friends?” Kennedy suggests, trying to unpack my idea.
My imagination instantly conjures his female fan club, artsy girls with names like Sage and Mila and Blyth. I give them quirky plaits andAmeliefringe, dress them in black, with tartan skirts and ripped tights, while they listen to prog rock from the seventies and get high with him in an abandoned warehouse.
I’ve never been high. My toes squirm inside my school shoes, which now feel even more perfect and shiny beside the nonregulation Doc Martens Kennedy’s harem would obviously wear, and I wish I’d broken the school’s policy on makeup and put on some eyeliner or something. Not that I’m the policy-breaking type. Or any good with eyeliner.
“Friends, girlfriends, sisters,” I clarify, “doing random things that they love, you know? No pressure. As if the camera isn’t there.”
Maybe we’d even reclaim She Loves It. Of course, in my head this is already bigger than a photography exhibition because I can never just do somethingsimple. I want to dismantle what they’ve done and take the power back. “We could start a blog!Shift the narrative? Go behind the scenes of private schoolboys looking at girls through a new lens?”
Kennedy stares at me. In fact, everyone stares, and not in a good way. I’m so used to the girls in our school talking fiercely about feminism and misogyny in classes and debates, but it’s brutally obvious that the same conversations aren’t going on here, where they’re most needed.
“Wow,” someone says from the back. “You’re intense.”
That’s it. A volcano explodes inside me and I appeal to the only boy in the room who doesn’t seem to be laughing at me.
“I’m not intenseenough. You have no idea how much damage you do.”
I don’t mean him personally. Not unless he’s like the rest of them, which, let’s face it, is statistically likely in a culture like this.
“Isn’t your school in economic jeopardy from all that bad publicity? I bet the board would throw money at a project like this.” I seem to have shape-shifted into a forty-eight-year-old mother at a PTA meeting, but I’m not some weird economics genius. I know this stuff because it came up in a commerce class last week.
“I’m sorry, whoareyou?” Kennedy asks.
